Editor without a cause
The January issue of Socialist Voice featured an article on trans healthcare accompanied by a note from the editor. It reads like an apology for printing an article that contains so much pseudo-Marxist ‘analysis’ heaped upon layers of other pseudo ‘sciences’ but what it actually demonstrates is that the editor didn’t have the courage to say no thanks to the author and had to find a way out of the dilemma.
However, dear editor inadvertently opened up a hornet’s nest, not regarding the offending article but directly related to the note itself.
We are given the impression that the Party has gone all cuddly regarding debate within its ranks: “It goes without saying that debate on these questions among comrades proceeds based on absolute respect for each other’s position and personal integrity.”
We could go on with this but first we would like to give the editor the opportunity to tell the world when all this tolerance for debate, all this human solidarity, all this respect for human dignity and integrity broke out in the Party? Apart from asking when these developments allegedly took place, we will leave it at that.
An appropriate response – had an editor deemed it entirely necessary to print the article in the first place – would have been to commission an article from a knowledgeable source (inside or outside the Party) to respond to the content and addressing the issues from a class point of view. And then return swiftly to what should be the real business of a communist party publication.
It is another example of the Party having its agenda dictated by outside influences and inside sectional interests as it always has been. Dangle a ‘cause’ – any ‘cause’ – in front of the CPI and off it goes on another march or picket or protest. This results from the enduring failure, refusal even, of the Party to have any plan or purpose of its own.
It looks like this chronic lack of planning is because of a complete lack of confidence within its leadership to take responsibility for establishing a political and strategic way forward.
The same can be said for Socialist Voice: what is it? A campaigning organ, a theoretical magazine? Similarly for the Party website: what is its purpose?
Naturally and inevitably, the weakness of the editors’ position and the weakness of the content of the original article and of the CPI itself as a communist party was very neatly summarised in a Letter to the Editor of Socialist Voice from Niall Cullinane (see below).
Read what Cullinane has to say about the objectives of a communist party and reflect on how the CPI has come up to that challenge. The publication of his letter is not a sign of openness to debate or willingness to accommodate alternative views: it is an unavoidable consequence of the publication of the article and of the utterly inept editor’s note that in a crude and clumsy way attempted to cover the editor from just such a response.
Clearly, it did not work as intended. One major duty of an editor is to protect the publication from being opened up to analysis or criticism that it cannot defend or justify. This note is just another example of the editor of Socialist Voice caving in to pressure and not having the necessary bits to say no to a contributor, with a respectful explanation of why the piece was not suitable for a communist publication.
It is difficult to conclude other than that the CPI has made itself irrelevant.
Unfortunately, by printing such material as the complained of article, combined with all the other accumulated deficiencies, the CPI has contributed only to making socialism and the class approach to politics in Ireland irrelevant also.
It is politically naïve of the CPI to expect that communists outside the Party will allow that trend to continue unchallenged. A specific point of interest is when or if ‘communists’ within the Party say enough is enough? Communists outside the Party can influence what happens; communists within the Party could change what happens and they will be judged on how successful, or otherwise, they are.
The fact is that most of the issues pursued by the Party are more suited and best left to campaign groups, to so-called liberals, social democrats, or soft or pseudo left parties like Sinn Féin and the distinctly anti-communist People before Profit. That’s what they do best, and they always do it better than the CPI. What does the CPI do better than any of them?
The answer is that there is nothing that the CPI does better than any of those organisations.
But, it does not have to be like that and should not be like that. It is a direct indictment of the CPI that it has not fulfilled it’s role as a revolutionary party – nobody else is to blame. That is the substantive issue: The role of the organisations above is to alter aspects of society and they approach that role with tactics that have provided various degrees of success and failure.
Ther role of the CPI is to change society and it’s approach to that role has been – and remains – utterly and completely inept. In fact, whatever understanding it had of its revolutionary role in the past is now lost in a haze of hopelessness, organisational disarray, self-congratulation and incompetent leadership. Or, as the song goes – it’s on its own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.
“The role of the CPI is to change society and it’s approach to that role has been – and remains – utterly and completely inept.“
There’s no nice way to put this: The Party leadership and the Party members believe in nothing because they have nothing to believe in. No hopes, no plans, no strategies, no tactics, no functioning structures, no organisation, no discipline and no set goals leaves them stranded in no-man’s land flailing about on the lookout for a life-raft in the form of the next popular or sexy cause. The metaphor in the last sentence is deliberate as it accurately reflects the woolly and wistful thinking that pervades the CPI at all levels.
You don’t win serious political battles this way and the failure of the CPI to make ANY mark on the Irish political and social landscape says more about its ineptness than any analysis we might offer.
They don’t know what they are or what they are supposed to be, but it is time they started to find out.
Socialist Voice – as the public face of the CPI – with a purpose, with clear aims and objectives, confident, reliable and consistently professional in the hands of a competent functioning editor could be a way to start.
Letter to the Editor
Written by Niall Cullinane on 31st January 2025
January’s Socialist Voice issued an editorial accompanying an article about trangender rights[1] that rightly calls for respect in debates on this topic. Surely, the more obvious issue here is why we have this debate at all. From the point of view of scientific socialism, the matter is entirely irrelevant.
As the article on “puberty blockers” demonstrates, some seek to give the issue of transgender rights a “Marxian” slant by arguing that capitalists are behind the bans in Northern Ireland. Capitalists’ objective, the article claimed, is to preserve a gender-binary labour force, which enables the “double-dip exploitation” of women. That attributes impressive foresight to the capitalists of the North. Most capitalists, most of the time, are usually poor at investment planning beyond a few years. If the thesis of the article holds, capitalists are now alleged to excel at long-term social engineering regarding women’s reproductive propensities to suit accumulation needs for the decades ahead, in cahoots with Sinn Féin. The article does not specify which capitalists are involved in which sectors. Nor does the article specify why capitalists seek to plan labour supply issues so far into the future and why puberty blockers are the chosen means to achieve this. Similarly, the article claims that breaking binary genders would weaken capitalist power. However, the proportion of the population undergoing gender transition is statistically tiny: possibly 0.017% of the Irish population (one media report from Newstalk claims 900 people changed their gender in Ireland between 2015 and 2023). Even if we accept that gender fluidity changes power balances in the labour market, its broader impact would be negligible, given the small numbers.
While the new generation of leftists emerging in the post-2008 era has embraced trans issues as an accompaniment to their politics, there are likely some Communists who believe nothing exemplifies “bourgeois individualism” more than that one’s subjective feelings about oneself should take precedence over a given biological imposition of nature. Other Communists of a certain stock may see such issues as exemplifying, in some vague way, the dysphoria of “moribund capitalist culture”. I think such views are probably wrong: humans have always sought to overcome experienced natural constraints in different ways, and trans identities are known in non-capitalist societies.
However, pace the younger generation of leftists, the more significant matter – to return to an earlier point – is that trans rights are issues Communists should probably be silent on. Communists cannot, and should not, take up every exploitation, concern or grievance preoccupying society. To do so promotes a disorganised, distracted and diluted character, where the “strategy” jumps from one injustice to the next. Given the barbarism capitalism is hurtling towards, Communists cannot afford such luxury. Campaign groups already advocate for such legitimate issues as trans rights, and some Communists may individually support those causes in their private lives, as this author does. However, it is not the role of the Communist movement to chase the tail of every individual, group or social grievance that presents itself. Communists are not a party of campaigns but a party of structural change. The overriding objective is to raise class consciousness to help “burst asunder” the “fetters” of capitalist social relations as quickly as we can: anything that does not advance that objective in concrete, meaningful ways is, from the scientific socialist point of view, irrelevant. There are, of course, some existing social grievances that will contribute to Communist objectives. Still, some will not or will do so only in the most tangential of ways, and it is important to be judicious in deciding where to marshal scarce resources to get a satisfactory return on investment. Championing puberty blockers – whatever one’s private opinion on the matter – is unlikely to be a wise investment of Communist time.
References:
[1]Each, A. (2025) “Banning trans healthcare: a murderous act of class treachery” Socialist Voice January 2025 issue: https://socialistvoice.ie/2025/01/banning-trans-healthcare-a-murderous-act-of-class-treachery/